Photo courtesy of Nils Timm
Roy and Carol Doumani first met the artist Robert Graham in the 1970s, at a celebration of his newly completed Dance Door at a home in Beverly Hills. The Doumanis were taken with the monumental bronze sculpture, now on permanent public display in downtown Los Angeles. Planning to build on their own beachfront property in Marina del Rey, they asked Graham if he might create a custom work for their future home. Graham agreed—sort of. Instead of a single new work, the artist proposed designing the entire house. Under Graham’s direction, the singular Doumani House ultimately would include not only dozens of Graham’s sculptures but also commissions from DeWain Valentine, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and Tony Berlant, among others, embodying a one-of-a-kind living portrait of the vibrant Los Angeles art scene of the 1980s and 90s.
The home’s fixtures and features became extraordinary opportunities for Los Angeles artists to channel their skill in new and unexpected ways.
Graham’s vision took the form of a U-shaped structure divided into two distinct wings, constructed from white stucco and steel with black glass windows. Completed in 1982, its roughly 6,600 square feet interior encompasses three bedrooms and an open-plan living and dining room, with two kitchens, a pool, elevator, theater, and four-car garage. As for the home’s fixtures and features, they became extraordinary opportunities for Los Angeles artists to channel their skill in new and unexpected ways: the home’s double entry doors were made from stained glass by the painter David Novros, Eric Orr fashioned a skylight water feature, Ed Moses designed a window to frame the ocean view, and Billy Al Bengston and Larry Bell made custom furnishings.
“[Robert] wanted to eliminate the boundaries between art and craft,” Carol recalled to the Wall Street Journal. The artist discouraged the couple from working with an interior designer, which he felt would detract from the home’s identity as a work of art. After the home’s completion, Graham would frequently visit the Doumanis for dinner—not least on gatherings on February 17th (move-in day) when the pair invited contributing artists for reunions to celebrate their work together. Graham designed only one other home before his death in 2008, and it was his own that he shared with his wife, actress Angelica Huston, in nearby Venice.
“[Robert] wanted to eliminate the boundaries between art and craft..."
Emerging from an explosively influential moment in the history of both contemporary art and Los Angeles, the Doumani House Collection reflects the idealism and embrace of creative freedom that has shaped the California spirit—for both Graham and the Doumanis, art was not an object, but a way of life that imbued every aspect of experience, from floor to ceiling and wall to wall.
Photo courtesy of Nils Timm
What an artist does is in the gift realm, it’s beyond commerce.
Robert Graham
Robert Graham 1938–2008
Born in Mexico in 1938 and raised in Mexico City and San Jose, California, Robert Graham became widely celebrated for his bronze sculpture and his ability to seamlessly transition between monumental and intimate scales. Growing up in Mexico City, Graham visited public monuments, pyramids, murals, and churches, introducing him to the potential of large-scale art and architectural works outside of the confines of the museum.
On the personal level, Graham dedicated himself to the female nude — intimate, immediate, endless renditions of strong and confident female forms in drawings, engravings, and sculpture created over the course of four decades. Melding realism with expression force, Graham’s female sculptures are powerful and muscular forms, not romanticized or generalized, but naturalistic. According to Graham’s peer Tony Berlant “if you look at them, you see individual personalities…They are portraits — not generic.”
Graham’s renderings of the female form in bronze informed his unique MOCA Torso project. Spurred by the LA Riots of 1992, Graham trained young Angelenos and former gang members in bronze casting to create a collaborative edition of 3,500 sculptures over the course of three years, sold to benefit the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
As Graham’s skill and reputation grew, he became an in-demand creator of bronze public monuments celebrating admirable Americans. Monument to Joe Louis (1986) suspends a 24-foot long, 8,000-pound bronze rendering of the boxer’s arm and fist above a major downtown intersection in Detroit. In 1997, the City of New York was gifted Graham’s cast bronze and gold leaf Duke Ellington Memorial, in which the figure of Ellington and his piano stand 30 feet high atop three columns of Muses holding him aloft.
Graham’s adopted hometown of Los Angeles is home to several of his public works, including at the modern Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. A massive project, Graham worked for nearly five years with some 150 artists to create the church's bronze doors, which the cathedral proudly identifies as different than any other entrance to a Christian place of worship. Instead of using typical Old and New Testament biblical stories as images, Graham chose to create scenes that are “culturally recognizable.” In addition to the serene 8-foot angel on top of the doors, there are ten Virgin mothers of varying ethnic origins depicted, including the Andean Pomata, Mexican Guadalupe, and Peruvian Belén, continuing Graham’s legacy of monumentalizing women in a plurality of forms.
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